The current administration’s anti-trans policies are also eugenicist policies, meant to push trans people further into society’s margins. But eugenics and ableism have been on the rise even before Trump took office.

So this week, we’re featuring a Q&A on the Transgender Law Center’s latest in its Journalist Resources Series, about better reporting on disabled communities. The Disability Project’s senior national organizers, Ericka A. Dixon and Sebastian Margaret, talked with The Objective to share more about the guide, produced in conjunction with other disabled organizers, about reporters’ role in eroding ableism’s impact on those most marginalized and the disability stories they’d like to see more coverage of.

The Trans Law Center and The Disability Project are also holding a webinar later this spring to discuss the guide and reporting on disability under a rise in eugenicist policies, which you can sign up for here.

In this issue:

And also: Four Gaza journalists share what keeps them reporting, the Center for Public Integrity officially closes, looking at American Journalism Project co-founder John Thornton’s legacy, and the Department of Health and Human Services makes another move to decrease transparency. And the resource of the week is an upcoming training to increase source safety.

—James Salanga

In recent years, the Transgender Law Center has been producing a series of resources for journalists to improve their coverage. The latest in the series is the Guide to Reporting on Disabled Communities, shepherded to fruition by The Disability Project’s senior national organizers Ericka A. Dixon and Sebastian Margaret in conjunction with other disabled organizers.

In a conversation with The Objective, Dixon and Margaret reflected on their work creating the guide, the interlocking systems of oppression impacting marginalized disabled people, how to expand journalists’ ideas of what “disability stories” are, and the importance of recognizing disabled people as the narrators of their own lived experiences.

What missteps and misunderstandings have you seen from reporters looking to report on disability?

Dixon: I think a lot of the missteps are …  in terms of, you know, people only seeking out kind of the like white, blonde hair, blue-eyed child that runs on their prosthetic leg and is like, “Oh, look, I’m going to the Olympics despite it all.”

I think people seek out the sensational stories of overcoming and [without] recognizing that's feeding into a really harmful trope of disabled people as being inspirational simply because they have a disability and they're living their life, as one does — as we all do.

But it also, I think, just narrows the audience of who people are reaching and whose stories are getting told. So [I’m] really wanting to broaden people's perspectives of what disability community stories are, and how they can be held with care and give people dignity and respect.

Also, something that I've seen happen, that we address in the guide, is when people are reporting about police murders, for example, they're reporting about a Black person, but they don't talk about their disability or they don't talk about the role that ableism played in the violence that they experienced. And that's a piece of disability reporting — calling out when ableism is being used and leveraged to support anti-Black racism, to support white supremacy and to support misogyny.

Being able to recognize that and call it out when it's happening in news stories, I think, is something that journalists might not do.

I think something that also happens is that journalists try to speak for disabled people instead of letting disabled people share their own stories.

Margaret: One of the other ones is not being duped into believing that an advocate — somebody (usually able-bodied) who works in disability service provision, somebody who's an able-bodied parent, a guardian, a close friend, a partner, a sibling of a disabled person — that they are a suitable person to speak about the experiences of their familial relation, their students, their clients, or disabled communities. That [advocate] is not the right person.

And too often, in regard to disabled life experience, our lived experience therefore politics, analysis, culture, history, and resistance — more than for any other identity group, it is still acceptable to believe somebody who doesn't live with personal experience of the oppression is a viable proxy for the people who do. That this happens with frequency in of itself reflects the deep ways ableism prohibits the recognition of our competency and innate credibility.

To what Ericka said: We are the narrators of our lived experience and our politics. No one else can do that for us. No one else should be asked to do that for us. And if you are asking somebody else believing they are a credible person, then it's time to pause right there. Because they're not.

I would also add, and I believe it's in the guide: Collaborate with disabled journalists, because they too exist and have been working hard and accountably to shift narratives from inside the journalism world for a long time. Explore how you can amplify their work. You're in a field of expertise and have a platform and privilege to leverage to corrode practices and traditions that are likely biased in multiple ways against disabled journalists.

What can you do if you are a non-disabled journalist to help amplify the work and the leadership of disabled journalists? In particular, BIPOC disabled journalists, because that's a very clear place of what credible leadership looks like from a disability justice framework. And if there's not BIPOC folks available, then make sure the white folks you're talking to are coming from and very closely connected to a working-class experience and work closely with BIPOC colleagues.Read the full Q&A on The Objective.—James Salanga

—————

After administrative retaliation, escalating tensions between the advisor and staff led to long-time student paper The Mercury effectively disbanding — and a newly independent paper rising in its wake. Read more.

Center for Public Integrity (officially) closes: Last year, the 36-year-old newsroom stopped taking donations and by Nov. 30, had a staff of zero. Former CPI editor and investigative journalist Mc Nelly Torres mourned the loss, saying the board members — who didn’t have term limits — ”never learned from their mistakes and that they were such poor stewards of the organization and did not take their fiduciary duties seriously.” CPI is now in talks to transfer its archives to the anti-corruption watchdog Project on Government Oversight.

🔎 Read more in Columbia Journalism Review.

Gaza journalists on Israeli hit list refuse to stop reporting: The late Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat was one of six on an Israeli hit list. Four out of five of the surviving journalists, all correspondents with Al Jazeera, share their reactions to Shabat’s death, how they’ve been persisting in covering the attrition on their homeland, and what they want folks to know about reporting in Israel’s crosshairs.

🎤 Read more in Drop Site News.

John Thornton, co-founder of American Journalism Project, dies at 59: Thornton co-founded the Texas Tribune, which several other nonprofit newsrooms — like CalMatters — based their operating models on and sought to take that model across the country. Columbia Journalism Review executive editor Sewell Chan, who spoke with Thornton before taking on an editor-in-chief role at the Tribune, pays homage to Thornton’s career and work.

📂 Read more in Columbia Journalism Review.

Department of Health and Human Services shutters several FOIA offices: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was among the agencies that had its FOIA office eliminated late Monday night. Department head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says it’s a move to consolidate the offices into one HHS-wide office in accordance with a broader HHS restructuring. Workers told POLITICO they’re concerned about how the move will decrease transparency, as the closed offices received thousands of requests a year.

🏥 Read more in POLITICO.

This week’s resource is … an upcoming training from The Signals Network and Reynolds Journalism Institute about protecting sources.

The training will be free to access through The Signals Network’s website starting in June.

It plans to focus on five key areas to protect sources: establishing secure communication and guidelines, helping with accurate risk assessment, handling sensitive documents and materials safely, building trust through honest communication, and making strategic decisions that both prioritize sources’ safety and articles’ impact.

The Signals Network was founded in 2017 to provide a holistic suite of services to people who have been or could be negatively impacted by participating as a news source, including legal assistance, psychological support, physical security measures, temporary safe housing, online safety protection, career guidance, and communication support. In the past three months, the organization says it’s received a 220% increase in requests for support.

For more style guides, journalism job boards, and tip sheets, check out The Objective’s resource list.

Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

— 30 —